SquirrelFish Extreme mops floor with V8, TraceMonkey

The new SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine is kicking ass and taking names …

The WebKit team has announced its next-generation JavaScript engine, called SquirrelFish Extreme, before the previous SquirrelFish even made it into a shipping product. In the last three months, though, serious speed gains have been made, making regular old SquirrelFish look old 'n' busted and leaving the current competition in the dust.

Earlier this year, both Safari and Firefox made major updates that introduced significant speed boosts in JavaScript execution. Then in June, the WebKit team introduced a completely redesigned JavaScript engine called SquirrelFish that uses a JIT bytecode interpreter. This approach netted a 50 percent speed boost when benchmarked using the SunSpider benchmark.

The new-new SquirrelFish Extreme even kicks its own old-new SquirrelFish ass.
Graph by Maciej Stachowiak.

Since then, Mozilla has announced a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey, expected to ship in Firefox 3.1 slated for release later this year and, by all accounts, introduces significant speed gains. Also, Google announced a new browser called Chrome, and though it uses WebKit rendering, it features its own V8 JavaScript engine. According to recent testing by JavaScript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, both V8 and TraceMonkey are quite fast.

SquirrelFish Extreme leaves both engines spinning their wheels by adding four technologies to the JIT bytecode interpreter. First, the team added significant optimizations to the bytecode interpreter. They also added polymorphic inline cache, context threading, and an optimized regular expression engine. If that's all over your head, though, fret not. Just know that future versions of Safari and MobileSafari will be wicked fast.

Though the competition is fierce*, it only benefits end users in the long run. As more and more applications and services are moved online, and make use frameworks like jQuery, SproutCore, or Cappuccino, JavaScript performance becomes an increasingly larger part of making a snappy web experience.

You'll soon be able to find a more in-depth look into SquirrelFish Extreme by JavaScript genius and creator of jQuery John Resig here on Ars (probably on our open-source journal, Open Ended) if you're interested in the dirty details. Stay tuned.

*Actually, my guess is that the competition is probably pretty friendly.